Costuming Made Easy: How to Make Theatrical Costumes from Cast-Off Clothing

The book lacks details on the conversions of purchased items to the costume. It is limited to specific conversions for specific roles in theater productions. Many of the ideas can probably be adapted or serve as inspiration for other needs; but I just feel the book serves only in a very general capacity as a guide to utilize a ready-made garment as the base for a costume. Nevertheless, considering the cost of fabric today, this book does show an alternative approach to costume creation.

The idea behind this book is smart: take old or thrifted items and utilize them to create costumes. Noting that however there are two main flaws with this book. The first is that all of the images inside are in black and white which is fine for some of the simpler pieces, but a hindrance when there's more deconstruction involved. The second flaw is obviously the fact that this book relies on the user having access to the base garments and some pieces are for more difficult to source than they may have been when the book was written. Overall, it offers an interesting way to look at and possibly craft costumes, but for me personally it's less about replicating the ideas and more about finding ways to incorporate them so that they make sense with what I have access to.

I had such high hopes for this book... but was VERY disappointed. First of all it is an old book, and I am so sorry I didn't check the copyright dates. Secondly, all the costumes are dependant on finding other costumes or vintage items to turn into something else. I am perfectly capable of scouring thrift shops, but if I could find the pieces she suggests, it would be simple for even a new costumer to duplicate her pieces without the assistance of this book. Third.... she uses hot glue almost exclusively. As most costumers would agree, hot glue on fabric is neither attractive nor long-lasting. I can't think of anyone I would recommend this book to.

This was unpretentious and informative for a beginner like myself who doesn't really want to sew anything from scratch - and that is what it purports to be. May not be as useful to someone who is an experienced seamstress - but you never know. Many of those people can be quite unimaginative when they don't have a pattern to work from. This had some interesting ideas, plus appealed to the reconstruction artist in me.

If you think this book would be a good inspiring source for your Halloween costume or for your kids' school show, think again.The ideas in this book are good but it has several big problems. First, there are no color pictures. Each entity has a hand drawn illustration for the alternation and a two inches high, whole person figure, very bad quality, black and white picture to show the final result. Since most of the costumes here need at lest two pieces of original clothing of different color and style to combine with, only if you saw a lot of board way show and hopefully remember exactly how the major characters' costumes looked like, you probably will be easily confused by those illustrations. Second, a lot of material she used here is originally costume itself (or quite fancy old-style dress to say the least) but not ordinary cast-off clothing you might think you could find in nowadays closet.

This book might be useful IF you were working with an elementary school drama club, in a big enough city to have dozens of thrift stores and IF you had absolutely NO skills at sewing, ability to read a script OR imagination. I ordered it because it looked like it might have some useful suggestions, but it is nothing but a record of how a specific garment was changed into a specific costume, mostly with hot glue. It's not even accurate as to when various musicals are set!

a bore. not much in it that the experienced already knows. this would be good for a high school student that it just getting started but it's kind of a waste of money

Bought for research.

Lots of good ideas which are practical and effective. I'm impressed how many shows Barb has done and how well the costumes look.